MUSIC REVIEW; Into the Orchestral 'Ring,' Where Sound Stands Alone

Wagner wanted his orchestra subterranean, his music an invisible atmosphere supporting the life of his characters and their world. But there are advantages, too, in putting the music and the orchestra on display, as the New York Philharmonic did on Thursday night when it invited Lorin Maazel to conduct his compilation ''The Ring Without Words,'' a 70-minute Rhine journey from the birth-of-nature music at the start of ''Das Rheingold'' to the ecstatic cataclysm that closes ''Gotterdammerung.''

Marvelous things were seen and heard along the way. Hammers rose and thwacked at the creation of the Rainbow Bridge. To the right, a large choir of trumpeters and trombonists raised their instruments to their lips and blew with unbounded splendor throughout the performance. To the left, a sea of horns held sway. Cellos scrubbed eagerly and exactly in the storm at Siegmund's breathless arrival. Hands danced at the glockenspiel. Timpani strokes were beautifully gauged in force and texture at the opening of Siegfried's funeral music.

But Mr. Maazel's attempt to create an orchestral purview of the ''Ring,'' honorably made without changing a note (beyond very occasionally transferring a vocal line to an instrument), came across as a project in the process of collapse. Some of the joins were abrupt. Just as the ''Rheingold'' opening was rising -- with superb fullness in the river-swell music and rich texture -- came a cut to the airy music of the gods. Out of the Magic Fire Music, again texturally ample and magnificent, jumped Siegfried's happy-go-lucky tune. Half an hour and one and a half operas later, his funeral music crashed into Brunnhilde's immolation scene.

Also, though Wagner made some of the orchestral sequences work as concert items, others project an exhilaration, emphasis, tension or triumph that requires some dramatic context. The passionate euphoria created to end the first act of ''Die Walkure,'' for instance, concludes a process that, in the opera, started over an hour earlier, when Siegmund and Sieglinde first met.

Edited out as an orchestral moment, the passage had no reason to be so excited.

Anyone judging only by Mr. Maazel's command and the players' response, though, most certainly did.